Designed for secondary school English teachers who want to help their students develop enthusiasm for words, their histories, and the way language structures words to produce meaning, this paper offers suggestions for a program of study employing dictionary projects and personal experience. The paper describes making a class dictionary of teen language, involving such activities as the following: (1) posting words on a class bulletin board; (2) interviewing students and parents to gather words; (3) examining dictionaries to see what words they contain; (4) examining textbooks for ways to present new terms; (5) examining dictionary histories; (6) deciding how to select words; (7) writing definitions; (8) determining spellings and variant spellings as well as pronunciation and usage; (9) debating decisions of correctness versus majority rule; and (10) accounting for changes in meanings of various words. The paper argues that this broader, deeper type of language study remedies past problems of paying exclusive attention to memorization and mechanical skill, because students begin to understand the nature of the language system they have mastered. The paper suggests additional language lesson plans based on different areas of linguistic studies, including units on generating spelling rules from observations of spelling patterns, proposing a reform of English spelling, illustrating a definition, compiling lists of morphemes, and compiling sequences of words with relative shades meaning. (JG)